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THE ARABS. 209
The school of EJessa, a prototype of the Beuediciinc. schools
of Monte Cassino and Salerno, gave the first impulse to a sci
entific investigation of remedial agents yielded from the mineral
and vegetable kingdoms. When these establishments
were dissolved by Christian fanaticism, under Zeno the Isau-
rian, the Nestorians were scattered over Persia, where they
soon attaip.ed to political importance, and founded at Dschondisapur,
in Khusistan, a medical school, which was afterward
much frequented. They succeeded, toward the middle of the
seventh century, in extending their knowledge and their doc-
trines as far as China, under the Thang dynasty, 51'^ years
after Buddhism had penetrated thither from India.
The seeds of Western civilization, which had been scattered
over Persia by learned monks and by the philosophers of
the last Platonic school at Athens, persecuted by Justinian
had exercised a beneficial influence on the Arabs during their
first Asiatic campaigns. However faint the sparks of knowl-
edge diffused by the Nestorian priesthood might have been,
their peculiar tendency to the investigation of medical pharmacy
could not fail to influence a race which had so lone
lived in the enjoyment of a free communion with nature, and
which preserved a more vivid feeling for every idnd of natural
investigation than the Greek and Italian inhabitants of cities.
The cosmical importance attached to the age of the Arabs
depends in a great measure on the national characteristics
which we are here considering. The Arabs, I would again re-
mark, are to be regarded as the actual founders of physical sci-
ence, considered in the sense which we now apply to the words.
It is undoubtedly extremely difficult to associate any abso-
lute beginning with any definite epoch of time in the history
of the mental world and of the intimately-connected elements
of thought. Individual luminous points of knowledge, and
the processes by which knowledge was gradually attained,
may be traced scattered through very early periods of time.
How great is the diflercnce that separates Dioscorides, who
distilled mercury from cinnabar, from the Arabian chemist
Dscheber how ; widely is Ptolemy, as an optician, removec]
from Alhazen ; but we must, nevertheless, date the founda*
tion of the physical sciences, and even of natural science, from
the point where new paths were first trodden by many difierent
investigators, although with unequal success. To the mere
contemplation of nature, to the observation of the phenomena
accidentally presented to the eye in the terrestrial and celestial
regions of space, succeeds investigation luto ihe actual, an